Wireless technology has made it possible for email messages to be received and displayed by various portable electronic devices including Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), for example. Sending email messages including attachments, such as photographs or scanned documents, is becoming increasingly popular, however, most attachments are formatted for a rich desktop or printer experience and generally require a desktop PC with a large screen display for proper viewing. As such, viewing these attachments on the small screens of most portable electronic devices presents a challenge.
When a user makes a request to view an attachment, the request is received at a server where the attachment is scaled down to fit on the portable electronic device screen and then returned to the portable electronic device. When viewing high resolution attachments such as scanned documents, for example, details of the scaled down image are often difficult to distinguish. In order to view text or other details of the scaled down image, the user may enlarge a desired portion by selecting an appropriate menu option. Each time the user requests enlargement of an area of the scaled down image, the request is sent to the server and a higher resolution image of the selected area is returned to the portable electronic device. Often, the enlargement process must be performed multiple times before the user is able to view the details of the entire scanned document.